Too much government regulation hurts low-income Canadians - The Hub - "A recent Fraser Institute study, Economic Freedom Promotes Upward Income Mobility, shows that the onerous costs of regulation, including licensing and accreditation, erects unnecessary barriers to economic freedom, resulting in slow wage growth and stunted economic advancement in the labour market, one that disproportionately affects those at the bottom. Complexity, after all, is a subsidy. Over-credentialization (requiring workers to purchase occupational license, train to acquire credentials, or to pay regulatory fees before they can work) is often an unnecessary expense that increases start-up costs for workers and entrepreneurs. Authors Justin T. Callais and Vincent Geloso point out that economic freedom, on the other hand, is shown in many studies to be tied with numerous positive outcomes ranging from faster economic growth, to environmental progress, and greater resilience in the face of economic crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic we are still enduring. Additionally, they find that economic freedom appears to be highly related to four pillars of social mobility: Education Quality, Lifelong Learning, Technology Access, and Inclusive Institutions."
Democrats Borrow Castro Slogan for Their Outreach to Latino Voters - "This new initiative to reach out to Spanish-speaking voters uses the slogan “Adelante,” which means “onward” or “forward.” Now, a Spanish word shouldn’t be an issue in and of itself, but when that word carries an association with Fidel Castro and Cuba’s communists, it becomes loaded with baggage... It’s especially baffling in light of a survey at the end of last year from Equis Labs that demonstrated that roughly 40% of Latinos have expressed concern over the Democrats’ embrace of socialism... Naturally, the Democrats think it’s all about their new favorite word: disinformation"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Lived Experience - "‘Does Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, for that matter having had Coronavirus necessarily make them better able to handle it?’
‘I think you see in the different reaction of these two leaders who've had the virus that lived experience isn't really the decider.. lived experience is always inherently going to be very personal, it's going to reflect existing biases... it's only part of the mix. And at the moment, I think it's been exaggerated frankly'...
‘It was often said in politics that you shouldn't be a defense minister, unless you've been a soldier, you shouldn't have been Education Secretary unless you’d been a teacher, you shouldn't be a health secretary, unless you've been a doctor. My experience was the very worst ministers were the ones who'd actually done the job, naming no names and had the lived experience of that’...
‘I do struggle to think that you are to be on the side of the argument that says that the lived experience is absolutely essential to make a decision, I think, an example here, I mean, David Blunkett was born blind, and was told when he was a child, that he would be a piano tuner, or a Braille typist. He ended up as the Home Secretary. Now he ended up as Home Secretary not because he had the lived experience of being blind, but because he was determined not to allow his lived experience to place him in a category that limited what he was able to do.’...
‘Quite often in hospitals, people will come to doctors and say this is wrong with me or I now feel this and doctors have to say to them, no, you're wrong. And doctors can say that with confidence because they have authority. Does the discourse around lived experience undermine that authority? And don't we need that authority to occasionally be able to tell people when they're doing right or wrong?’...
‘You wrote an article that was headlined, forget anecdotes, if you want to know what's really happening, look at a spreadsheet. That doesn't seem to leave an awful lot of room for lived experience.’
‘Um, it doesn't directly. I think the the point I was making was very much, was that, you know, and I actually use the phrase spreadsheets are people too in the article, because I was trying to make the point, that actually, the experience of three or four people shouldn't necessarily be given that much weight when placed against the evidence that comes from quantitative, rigorous data, which we encapsulate in spreadsheets. When you use spreadsheets to talk about unemployment or employment or wages, we're catching the big, the actual lived experiences of millions of people. And in making policy, I think one could place more weight on that than the personal experiences of a few people’...
'‘The Catholic Church, in which we have priests who are celibate. And many Catholics find it quite difficult that they're told by priests how to manage their families. And very often Catholics say to the priest, how would you know? You don't have a family. But the answer to that is that actually not having a family is ironically, one of the things that gives the priest moral authority, it gives them objectivity, not being pulled in different directions by the passions and the traumas of having kids actually can give you a degree of moral authority that other people don't have. So sometimes, actually, ironically, I think the absence of experience or at least, not being totally submerged in experience can give you a clarity and a foresight that can lead to a more moral conclusion.'"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Celebrity Power - "‘They may get questioned. But ultimately, they're not accountable, are they? I mean, if a politician says something wrong, and it's demonstrated to be wrong, when they back the wrong cause, then well, at least notionally, they can be held accountable. When celebrities get it wrong, they just move on to something else don’t they?’
‘I think that's a very simplistic view, and particularly in in the current climate, where there's much more access to celebrities through social media, and they can be held much more accountable because they're more accessible to the public. Celebrities will not go into particular causes without having some forethought and thinking about the longer term sort of ambition if you want or the longer term objective.’
‘And so last March, the pop star Jamelia was invited onto TV to give her expert opinion on Brexit, she came up with the idea that over 75 shouldn't be allowed to vote. So it just strikes me that a lot of these sort of false narratives, the simplification of politics, it comes about because celebrities are giving too much of a platform on these issues. Don't you think there's a danger, that the issues become distorted and misrepresentative celebrities are left to talk about it?’"
Apparently genuinely anti-vaxx celebrities are held accountable so there's no problem
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The ‘Age of Impunity’ - "‘How much room is there in foreign policy for the muscular export of our values?’
‘Well, the conventional wisdom in most of foreign policy analysis is that it's all national interest and interests bake the cake and politician sprinkle little icing on it to make it look good. What I've done is looked at the 14 presidents since 1945, in the United States, and asked if you had that cynical view of whether morals matter, would you get history right or wrong? And what I've shown is there are a number of instances you're going to get history wrong.’...
'If you take the environment, for instance, we all want to save the world, by getting developing countries off fossil fuels, fuels is for our benefit, as well as for theirs. But, but newsflash, if you’re gonna do that, you're going to have to work with Modi in India, you're going to have to work with the Communist Party in China. Trying to bring down the Chinese Communist Party while trying to get it to reform its economy is a pretty tough thing to set up. So perhaps the tension we face in the future, is, do we want internationalism, where we all work together? Or do we want international liberalism? Maybe those two things don't actually go together. Maybe actually, what we want is everyone working in concert, but we might have to accept our differences, and even have to live alongside a little evil to get some things done.'"
So much for cynicism (justified as "realism") and realpolitik. Of course those might be accurate for other countries - especially non-Western ones
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Personal Responsibility - "‘For very nearly a year now we've been living intermittently with the most severe restrictions on our liberties ever imposed far exceeding those brought in at the outset of the two world wars.’...
‘I gave a talk at a girl school recently, and one of the other speakers said to those girls, you will always be oppressed because that, we are living under a patriarchy. In other words, that it's, it has a kind of disincentivizing result’...
‘It is a human instinct, when we're frustrated or hurt to want to blame somebody, but it's, it's not an instinct that we should succumb to... The media, for example, manipulating photographs to make beaches look more crowded, because it plays into our desire to blame someone, but it's a desire, we should resist it.’...
‘Ultimately, if we say that to people who are subjected to those disadvantages, that is inherited disadvantages, are unable to make free moral choices, and we must not hold them responsible, then we deprive them of the dignity of equality, of being the same as the rest of us. And to me, that is the worst thing of all because it's actually treating poor or impoverished or disadvantaged people as less than human.’"
Clearly, covid is even more dangerous and can kill even more than the two World Wars
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Meaning of Easter - "‘I'm sitting here tremendously jealous of what they do in Seville, which is the Feria de Abril. The riotous celebration of Andalusian culture, food and dance in the streets just shortly after Holy Week. We tend not to have so much of that here. Do you think there's something about Britishness or perhaps just Englishness which is bad at having fun?’
‘I think that in northern climes, there tends very often to be less exuberance, the sort that you find in the Mediterranean cultures. But I also think that the removal of the central religious emphasis in Easter has damped down in a very understandable and natural way, the catharsis of Easter. After all, we've done away by and large on a communal basis with Lent. And before the Reformation, Lent was not just a time when you were forbidden to eat particular types of food, couldn't play sports, couldn't hold parties, couldn't have sex, even in marriage. And so Easter Day was suddenly the moment when all those things became legal again. So the catharsis, the release, the joy of indulgence was absolutely sensational.’"
Overwork Killed More Than 745,000 People In A Year, WHO Finds - " Working long hours poses an occupational health risk that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, the World Health Organization says. People working 55 or more hours each week face an estimated 35% higher risk of a stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease, compared to people following the widely accepted standard of working 35 to 40 hours in a week, the WHO says... The study found the highest health burdens from overwork in men and in workers who are middle-age or older. Regionally, people in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific region had the most exposure to the risk. People in Europe had the lowest exposure. In the U.S., less than 5% of the population is exposed to long work hours, according to a map the WHO published with the study. That proportion is similar to Brazil and Canada — and much lower than Mexico and in countries across most of Central and South America."
The Americans are going to be very upset
Meme - *tattoos* "okay Stephanie now let's get one with your glasses on so we know what you look like wearing them"
Meme - "BLACK FUTURE
THE YEAR IS 2045
The Southern United States Lives Under BLACK RULE. All White Men Are Fed Hormones Sissified and Dominated. White Women Are Breeding Stock for Black Alphas. Visionary Erotica Author Whitney Ryan Invites You to Explore Book One of the Brand New BLACK FUTURE Series
GAME OVER WHITE BOY!"
shreepless in shreeatle on Twitter - "witch: *turns me into a frog* now suffer
me: *chilling on a leaf*
witch: wait
me: *experiencing happiness for the first time in my life*
witch: wait no"
Meme - "Friend named himself Butter in Elden Ring but the game censors "butt" so it looks like he named himself something much worse"
There might be rants in here — raptorofwar: thistherapylife: bastlynn: ... - "Remember in 1993 when Jurassic Park was like…the end all, be all of special effects?"
"I’m still somewhat convinced that someone sold their soul to create the special effects in Jurassic Park because that shit is over 20 years old and it still really, really holds up, better than the stuff in a lot of current movies, even. Fucking witchcraft, man."
"THEY ACTUALLY BUILT A GIANT MASSIVELY DETAILED FUCKING ANIMATRONIC T-REX FOR ALL OF THIS THAT’S WHY THE EFFECTS ARE SO GOOD. CAUSE IT AIN’T CGI. AND IT AIN’T GUY IN A COSTUME. IT’S A BIG FUCKING ROBOT DINOSAUR. AND EVERY PART IS DESIGNED TO MOVE. IT COST LIKE HALF THE BUDGET OF THE FILM."
"And they had the film it in small increments, especially in the outdoor scenes, because the rain fall kept soaking into the ‘skin’ of the rex and would slow down and mess up its movements. So they would stop filming and have a crew out there drying off this massive, fake dinosaur, and then they’d start filming again until it was too wet. Repeat until the end of the scene."
"They used animatronics and detailed costumes for most if not all of the dinosaurs in the first movie. The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic. And the raptors were dudes in suits. I shit you not."
"One of my favorite anecdotes I’ve read on tumblr is how the t-rex robot from Jurassic park would malfunction while it was drying out. How did it malfunction, you might wonder? Motherfucker randomly started moving. So apparently if you were on the jp set you would sometimes hear people screaming bloody murder even though they were all well aware that it was a giant animatronic puppet and wouldn’t actually, you know, eat them."
"So, I knew about the animatronics bit but I did not know the raptors were guys in suits and the malfunctioning t-rex sounds terrifying. And i just googled malfunctioning t-rex and was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside the t-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics. So of course, the power goes out. And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down. Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best. And this guy hoped for the best and got it. Some other people on stage pried open the t-rex jaws and glue guy crawled out of its mouth and was totally okay."
"this movie ADVANCED our best understanding of dinosaurs at the time. They were blowing out a budget bigger than anything Hollywood had ever seen, and along with employing almost the last hurrah of incredible physical FX, they had a bank of those newfangled digital SFX computers. Nobody’d ever really created convincing dinosaurs in a movie before. It’d all been stop-motion animation, and even when the models were exquisitely crafted, you could just tell there was something OFF about them. Spielberg wanted THE BEST DINOSAURS EVER, and he figured on using the cutting edge of digital modeling and animation technology to build them for him. So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.” The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass. They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that. And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that. One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.” He called up film of a chicken walking. Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.” Prior to 1989, the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs existed–we knew about archaeopteryx, we knew there was some minor connection there–but the idea that DINOSAURS LIVE IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY ARE CALLED BIRDS was not pre-eminent. Jurassic Park changed our scientific understanding of dinosaurs."
Meme - Jennifer Wortman: "Today I discovered my husband has me in his phone as "Jennifer Wortman.""
"Could be worse. One of my identical twins has the other twin in his phone as "spare parts.""
Woman's Coworker With Peanut Allergy Hospitalized After Stealing Lunch: AITA - "I’m being vilified by my coworkers, and I’m genuinely considering quitting my job because of this mess... She used an epipen, had to be hospitalized and now her dad is trying to hold me accountable for her bills and condition"
Japan’s most meaningless road sign discovered, has Internet feeling lost - "Saying the sign has “no information whatsoever is a bit of an exaggeration,” as it does tell you you’re on Prefectural Road 375. That’s the one and only piece of information you’re getting though"
'Ghost ships' found in Japan: What we know - "Evidence found on the boats and their grim cargo suggest they came from North Korea"
Japan Reportedly Lowering Legal Age To 18 For Actors To Star In Adult Videos - "the AV Human Rights and Ethics Organization has already started moving to prevent backlashes form the new law. Representative Director Yoko Shida also announced yesterday that they have issued a notice in light of the news. The notice, sent to AV companies, requests they only allow actors aged 20 and over to be filmed. They hope for compliance and agreement from the companies to avoid taking advantage of 18 and 19 year olds."
As if AV weren't fake enough - their advertised ages are fake too
Great Blue Herons Build Nests Next to Their Predators - The Atlantic - "A heron’s decision to build right next door to such a dangerous predator is a delicate trade-off. Bald eagles are territorial and will chase off other eagles. A heron colony with a neighboring eagle pair may lose some young to them, but the carnage would be greater without their protection... The colony’s located in a prime foraging area next to the Fraser River delta, where the eagles’ favored prey—fish—does not come with agitated parents. Waterfowl in winter also provide the eagles a cleansing of the palate."
Eric Lowe's answer to Why would gladiators choose to fight with a net and trident when they could have something more deadly? - Quora - "A gladiator contest was, first and foremost, a show. Gladiator types were characters—for instance, the retiarius armed with trident (i.e., fishing spear) and net was paired with a murmillo, who literally had a fish on top of his helmet. It’s a contest of Fisherman vs. Fish Man. That’s the gig. The point of a gladiator show was not to pick the deadliest weapon combination you could so you could kill the most opponents and thus live the longest. It was to put on a show, and that show had a genre. There were expectations. Fisherman fights Fish Man. Roman Man fights Barbarian Man. We know a fair amount about the gladiatorial diet and it’s a fair guess that they deliberately put on fat so they could cut each other and bleed for the crowd without giving each other life-threatening injuries, a bit like the old professional wrestling trick of giving yourself shallow cuts with a hidden razor blade to make the match look more serious than it actually is. We also have a reasonable estimate of the death rate among gladiators, and it’s pretty clear from that alone that they weren’t actually trying to kill each other in a match. Something I haven’t seen much classics work on, but which I think is important to add from a fencing perspective: I really can’t imagine anybody who’s seriously trained with weapons thinking that gladiators actually went after each other hammer and tongs. Unarmored, armed combat is over way too fast for that to be interesting. Even earnest play fencing is a pretty lousy spectator sport, let alone the real thing. I’ve done some stage gladiating with blunt weapons, and it’s noticeably different from fencing in earnest. When you’re genuinely trying to win, the fighting is conservative and you get a lot of boring techniques, like hitting your opponent’s fingers and forearms. When you’re fighting to put on a show, even when the March is 100% unscripted, you go for different things simply because anything else would be boring."
Salon in China quotes US$60 for hair perm, but afterwards says they divided man’s scalp into 12 sections, US$720 in total - "The man, surnamed Liu, went to the Zhenxuan Hair Salon in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, eastern China, last week to have a hair perm and styling... Mainland consumers are frequently overcharged and left with exorbitant bills, with consumer fraud a major problem in China. In February, a woman complained that a major hospital in Beijing had illegally charged her 38,000 yuan (US$5,655) for keeping her mother’s body for three days after she died. Zhengzhou TV reported in September last year that a woman had to pay 198,000 yuan (US$29,465) for a one-hour body massage at a beauty parlour in the city. The local market authority later investigated the case."
NFTs Show the Value of Owning the Unownable - The Atlantic - "The NFT craze, and the blockchains underlying it, lay bare the philosophical questions around why we treasure things beyond any tangible worth to us—and the leap of faith we indulge, wisely or otherwise, when we buy something not because of any innate worth to us but because we expect others to value it later. That its worth can arise through collective action is a testament to the unpredictability of human events—and a reminder that not everything in life gains value from top-down fiat."
The Future Is Not Only Useless, It’s Expensive - "it reflects the stunted inner lives of the finance and technology professionals who produced it. As the visual manifestation of cryptocurrency, NFT art combines the nuanced social awareness of computer programmers with the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers. It is art for people whose imaginations have been absolutely captured by a new kind of money you can do on the computer. It is also obviously a pyramid scheme, in which the need for a salable commodity is imperative and endlessly renewed, but the commodity itself does not matter because it is useless — not even useless the way all art is useless, because you can get the images and whatever grains of nourishment your hungry little soul might find in them for free, but useless the way a canceled stamp is useless, useless like a receipt or an envelope that has been torn open. NFTs are an occasion for commerce masquerading as art, just as so many ostensibly meaningful experiences of the 21st century turn out to be occasions to spend money masquerading as life."
Graduates lack ‘life experience’ and ‘hardiness’ to cope with front line, police chief warns - "Graduate-only entry to the police risks an influx of recruits who lack the “life experience” and “hardiness” to cope with the increasing violence that frontline officers face... Nick Adderley, chief constable of Northamptonshire police, said the plans to make policing a graduate-only profession from June 23 could create a “perfect storm” of inexperienced officers facing rising violence... Mr Adderley told Police Oracle there was a danger of police forces having a disproportionate and unbalanced mix of inexperienced, very young recruits... “When I speak to all of the cohorts who come in, I tell them quite clearly that this is not an extension of university. This is not an extension of sixth form college. This is a really serious business.” He said some were “a bit taken aback by their role”. In Northamptonshire, recruits have even walked out of training after undergoing sessions using a self-defence suit, saying they did not realise there would be that level of violence. They had also had officers saying they didn’t realise they needed to work evenings and weekends... He said the result was the force experiencing more officers suffering from mental ill health and more going off sick for injuries."
Suspect in ambush shootings of New York City police officers indicted on 52 counts - "A man suspected of ambushing New York City police officers during a shooting rampage last month was arraigned Wednesday on a 52-count indictment that includes multiple charges of attempted murder. The suspect, 45-year-old Robert Williams, was arraigned in Bronx Supreme Court on 11 counts of first-degree attempted murder, 12 counts of second-degree attempted murder, 11 counts of aggravated assault upon a police officer, 12-counts of first-degree attempted assault, two counts of second-degree assault and four counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon."
Alleged Bronx cop-shooter Robert Williams 'upset' since son's death - "The grandmother of accused Bronx cop-shooter Robert Williams said that he had been “upset” since his own son died from a gunshot on the borough’s streets."
Apparently he wanted more kids to die so more fathers would feel as depressed as he did
AI researchers use heartbeat detection to identify deepfake videos - "Existing deepfake detection models focus on traditional media forensics methods, like tracking unnatural eyelid movements or distortions at the edge of the face"
Six per cent of Americans believe they could beat a grizzly bear in a fight - " Six per cent of Americans believe they could beat up a grizzly bear in unarmed combat but almost a third think they would lose in a fight against a rat or house cat, a new survey has found. YouGov research found just 72 per cent of US men and women thought they would triumph in a clash with the rodent, while 69 per cent thought they would get the better of a domesticated feline. 61 per cent of Americans claimed they would best a goose. In findings that make a mockery of the pioneering spirit of the old West, less than half of those surveyed (49 per cent) thought they could beat a medium sized dog. That drops to just 23 per cent if the animal opponent was a large dog... The poll of 1,224 adults found that one in five US men thought they could knock out a chimpanzee or king cobra. There was no gender difference between men and women when it came to rating their personal chances in mano to animal combat. Both are equally unlikely to think they could win in a fight with lions, gorillas or bears. Differences do start to emerge between the sexes when it comes to battling wolves and kangaroos. About 17 per cent of American men fancy their chances against the boxing marsupials and wolves but only 11 per cent of women."
Meme - 1993 Walkman @Hoovnastyy: "IMO of humanity group-think has essentially zombies. Each split into group two using groups their of group-think zombies. Each group using their name calling to just further division - and they don't even know it."
Anni Bruno @Anni_Bruno: "Strong disagree. Most progressives have taken the time to consider all options before coming to a conclusion. The careful consideration that the other side might have a point. Conservatives have shown no such self reflection."
Haidt: Conservatives Understand Liberals Better Than Liberals Understand Conservatives
Ironic, given that conservatives understand liberals better than vice versa. So if anything progressives are the ones who don't self-reflect
Jim Fitton: Briton facing death penalty in Iraq ‘did not know he had broken law’ - "Jim Fitton, 66, took 12 stones and shards of broken pottery he had found at an archaelogical site in Eridu."
Meme - "Dont say its all gods plan and then blame Satan when things go wrong"
Woman travelled 500 miles to take UK's 'easiest' driving test and failed - "So, when one woman failed her first driving test in her native London, instead of re-booking locally, she decided to travel approximately 500 miles to the Isle of Mull, just off the west coast of Scotland, in search of the UK's 'easiest' test. Constance Kampfner spent 10 hours travelling north, by car and ferry, having handpicked the test route after discovering it only consisted of one roundabout; her biggest fear. However, on arrival, she struggled to find a single driving instructor willing to take her for her test, forcing her to turn to Facebook in desperation. "I was determined I would pass my driving test the second time - I simply needed to optimise my chances. A quick Google search told me where I needed to go, the Isle of Mull. I booked for the earliest available date, in mid-December," she told The Times. "For their lessons residents tend to head to Oban on the mainland, where the ferry to the island departs from. None of the instructors I got hold of fancied the trip, each warning me of high chances that my crossing would be cancelled in bad weather. I took to Facebook, where local paramedic Mairi took pity and offered her blue Mini." Constance was feeling confident, especially after learning Mull's single roundabout would not feature on her test and there was nowhere to parallel park - not to mention the stunning local scenery which glistened under the winter sun"
Meme - "AITA for serving my girlfriends cat divorce papers
I [26M] and my girlfriend [24F] have been dating for 2 years now. We have recently taken the next steps in our relationship and moved in together. Everything was going great until this recent event. We both have cats and our pets now live alongside us in our new apartment. I am very protective of my cat, but I really do not like my girlfriends cat. I feel like she is always watching me, and whenever I try to even stroke or approach her, she hisses at me. By comparison my cat is extremely friendly, snuggles with me and is just lovely to everyone. My girlfriend is a bit eccentric and normally I love that about her, but recently she keeps mentioning wanting a pet marriage. I am not a fan of this idea. First of all, who marries cats? Second of all I don't really want my cat to be married to hers. I dont like it. So I have made it clear to her that I am not for this idea. However, a few nights ago I came home from work and my gf had dressed the cats up and was in the middle of performing a marriage ceremony. I was really angry, she had gone behind my back when I had specifically told her not to. So, I felt I had to stoop to her level and have served her with divorce papers for our cats. She was really upset and hasnt spoken to me for 24 hours. She has even been sleeping in a seperate room. I don't know what to do. I can't help but feel I am not the villain in this story. So reddit, AITA for not wanting my cat to marry hers?"